Welcome

Revisionist is a tool for obtaining information about document versions (or revisions) stored on your Mac, managing those versions, and moving versioned documents around without losing those versions.

Nine years ago, OS X 10.7 Lion introduced a new system which enabled apps to autosave documents, and to support multiple versions of documents. At first these features were only available in Apple’s apps, but have since become common across many third-party apps too.

Oddly, versions are lost from documents in many common situations. Make a copy of a document, and the copy loses all previous versions. Move that document from one Mac to another using iCloud Drive, or on some external storage media, and previous versions will also be stripped. Revisionist makes true ‘deep’ copies of items which retain all existing versions, and preserves versions when moving items via iCloud Drive or any other medium. It can even move versions to Linux, Unix and Windows systems if you want.

The user interface to document versions is limited, some important features are so well-hidden as to be almost opaque, and it’s confined to apps capable of editing that specific type of document. When problems occur in the versioning system, they are extremely hard to detect, diagnose, or fix. Most common is the accumulation of versions, particularly of large documents, which can cause the versioning database to grow from a few hundred megabytes to tens of gigabytes or more.

Revisionist is a full version editor, a single tool which you can use to thin the versions stored, and perform maintenance on them. Because you can’t readily tell which documents have retained versions, it can also look through selected folders and inform you which files have more than just the current version, to help you identify those which may be causing problems.

➜ find which files have versions stored

➜ remove versions from a file

➜ make a copy of a document which preserves its versions

➜ make a folder containing an archive of all the versions of a document

➜ convert a version archive folder back into a document with version s

➜ further details

➜ updates

The Eclectic Light Company – https://eclecticlight.co